Love Lives Here

Every year, when we open nominations for our Valentine’s Sweetheart Giveaway, we expect beautiful stories.

And every year, this community exceeds anything we imagined.

We read about marriages that have stretched across five decades. About parents and grandparents who have quietly carried families on their backs. About neighbors who serve without applause. This town is stitched together by people who love steadily without needing recognition.

This year, one story lingered with us long after we finished reading it.

Bobby and Kaitlyn Hefter.

If you’ve ever driven the back roads outside of Waupun at sunrise, you know the kind of life they live. The lights are already on in the barn while most of us are still asleep. The work begins before the sky softens and doesn’t end simply because the clock says it should.

Bobby and Kaitlyn run a 75-cow dairy farm while raising their five children — their “small herd,” as Kaitlyn lovingly calls them. Farming is not seasonal effort; it is daily devotion. It is responsibility that doesn’t pause for holidays or convenience. In the summer months especially, nineteen-hour days are not uncommon. They are reality.

But what moved us wasn’t simply the length of those days. It was what happens after them.

After the barn is quiet. After the machinery is parked.After exhaustion would give anyone else permission to withdraw.

Bobby still comes inside and chooses his family.

He helps with bedtime. He answers small, important questions. He teaches his children how to work and how to care. He leads not with speeches, but with consistency. Kaitlyn wrote about the way he carries the weight of their livelihood without complaint, how he ensures she and the children feel seen and valued even when he himself is running on very little rest.

She nominated him because he would never nominate himself. And perhaps that is the most telling detail of all.

The kind of love we hoped to honor this Valentine’s Day has never been about grand gestures. It has always been about the steady kind — the kind that wakes up early, that stays late, that keeps promises, that builds something enduring day after day.

The Hefters are building more than a farm. They are building memory. Rhythm. Character. Their children are growing up watching what partnership looks like under pressure, what commitment looks like when it would be easier to quit, what love looks like when it is expressed through action instead of words.

When we announced Bobby and Kaitlyn as our 2026 winners, it felt less like selecting a name and more like acknowledging something already true: this is a family living out the very heart of our community.

The glider loveseat they received will sit somewhere on their property — maybe on a porch, maybe under an open sky — and it will become what good furniture always becomes: a gathering place. A landing spot at the end of long days. A place for children to climb up close. A place to talk about tomorrow’s chores and next year’s plans. A place to rest, even if just for a moment, before the rhythm begins again.

If anyone has earned that place to pause, it is this family.

To Bobby and Kaitlyn, thank you for allowing us to celebrate you. Thank you for showing us that strength can be quiet, that devotion can be ordinary, and that the most powerful kind of love is the one that simply keeps showing up.

And to every person who shared a nomination this year — thank you. Your stories remind us that Waupun is not defined by headlines, but by households. By people who choose each other daily. By families who build their lives on work, faith, and commitment.

Love lives here.

And we are grateful to witness it.

With admiration and warm congratulations,

The Werner Harmsen Family

Werner Harmsen Furniture | 116 E Main St, Waupun, WI | wernerharmsen.com

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